Intro

A correspondent was asking me some questions about the status of St. George, he–patron of England–who is not on our sanctoral calendar despite having several churches around the Episcopal Church named for him.

What’s up with that?

First Thoughts

Here’s a version of my initial response:

I’m at my daughter’s Parents’ Weekend at the moment so don’t have access to all of my records, but I can tell you this…

St. George was one of the saints on the first proposed American calendar during the 1913-28 period, but that calendar was voted down and not included in the 1928 BCP. When the topic was taken up again in Prayer Book Studies 9, St. George was the poster-child for “saints of dubious historicity.” Here’s the paragraph in question:

Not only are many of the most popular and widely commemorated saints of both the Eastern and the Western Churches of dubious historical authenticity; but, if their historicity is beyond reasonable doubt, there is no certain knowledge or information about their lives and character. It is impossible, for example, to establish the historical existence of St. George. The fact that he has become a patron saint of England does not make him any the more real; nor does it necessitate making him a saint of the American Church. Fairy-book tales may indeed be edifying. When they become part of the folklore and tradition of a great nation they can become stirring symbols. But it is asking too much of the majority of our American Church membership, who have no such traditional and patriotic associations with the name, to respond with mature devotion to a saint of whom it can only be said, “He may have existed, sometime, somewhere.” There are innumerable saints, many of them martyrs for the Faith, who deserve the thankful remembrance of the Church, but for whom the accidents of history have left no certain testimony. For these holy men and women whose memory might otherwise be forgotten by the faithful the Church provides the common feast of All Saints with its Octave. Where church dedications or other circumstances have left the memorial of saints who are scarcely recorded in the annals of history, the Prayer Book already provides two sets of propers for their commemoration: the Feast of the Dedication of a Church, and A Saint’s Day. These propers should give adequate coverage and usefulness for such occasions as may be desired by local parishes or parish groups.

PBS IX, p. 36.

Despite this, George was re-added in the Holy Women, Holy Men phase, and according to my records was in the HWHM editions of at least 2009 and 2013. He was also included in the ill-fated Great Cloud of Witnesses. In the return to Lesser Feasts & Fasts, though, he was once again dropped.

The largest hurdle to a new effort at including him would be the question of historicity–nailing down exactly who and when we’re talking about.

The Propers

Here’s the thing… When it comes to celebrating St. George, it doesn’t matter if he’s on the Official Calendar or in Lesser Feasts & Fasts. That’s because anyone (theoretically) can be liturgically celebrated if a local congregation chooses to. That’s the heart of the flexibility of our Calendar:

Subject to the rules of precedence governing Principal Feasts, Sundays, and Holy Days, the following may be observed with the Collects, Psalms, and Lessons, duly authorized by this Church . . . Other Commemorations, using the Common of Saints.

BCP, 18

So–yeah, any parish can celebrate St. George if they like using the Commons of Saints. That having been said, as I mentioned above, there were propers provided for St. George in HWHM:

I. Almighty God, who didst commission thy holy martyr George to bear before the rulers of this world the banner of the cross: Strengthen us in our battles against the great serpent of sin and evil, that we too may attain the crown of eternal life; through Jesus Christ our Redeemer, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

II. Almighty God, you commissioned your holy martyr George to bear before the rulers of this world the banner of the cross: Strengthen us in our battles against the great serpent of sin and evil, that we too may attain the crown of eternal life; through Jesus Christ our Redeemer, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

HWHM, p. 339

They’re different in Great Cloud of Witnesses. (I feel like I may have written these?? But haven’t checked back…)

Rite I. Lord Jesus Christ, whose cross didst seal thy servant George: Grant that we, strengthened by his example and prayers, may triumph to the end over all evils, to the glory of thy Name; for with the Father and Holy Spirit thou livest and reignest, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Rite II. Lord Jesus Christ, whose cross did seal your servant George: Grant that we, strengthened by his examples and prayers, may triumph to the end over all evils, to the glory of your Name; for with the Father and Holy Spirit you live and reign, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

GCW, p. April 23 (no actual page numbers??)

A Deeper Dive

A key question here is about history: Was George historical? Or, perhaps even better, What can be said about George from a historical perspective? I think that PBS IX raises a question worth examining when it asks whether people of mature devotion should be required to call upon a person who may or may not have existed–especially since there are so many fascinating worthies that history does record that the church of our day has completely forgotten (Radegund, anybody???)

Since the very first set of criteria were established for additions to the Episcopal calendar, historicity has been one of them. It’s worth looking into that a bit clearer.

At the Reformation, the cult of saints was one of the Reformers’ major objections with the Church of Rome. Issues involved matters of salvation, penance, and money (the Treasury of Merit binding these topics together), as well as dubious relics (cf. money again), an occlusion of Christ himself as our mediator with God, and–finally–the ahistorical and unhistorical tales of various saints recounted within the liturgy itself. As with many issues raised by the Reformers, sound minds within the Roman Church agreed that they weren’t entirely wrong. At the instigation of a couple of earnest researches, a organization arose to tackle some of these issues by means of that last item: The Bollandists.

A Jesuit named Herbert Rosweyde produced his principal work, an edition of the Vita Patrum [Lives of the Desert Fathers] in 1615 with the intention of creating a work that would focus on cutting through myth and pious legend, back to the best and most recoverable sources in Greek and Latin about the saint in question. This was the first step on a grand project, the Acta Sanctorum [Acts of the Saints] which would attempt to do this work or research and recovery on the full Roman Kalendar. Unfortunately, Fr. Rosweyde caught a disease from a dying man to whom he was ministering and died himself in 1629. But that’s not the end of the story: his work was taken up by another Jesuit, Fr. Jean Bolland, from whom the organization’s name would arise. Taking on an assistant named Henschenius, the first two volumes of the Acta Sanctorum were published in 1643. By the death of Henschenius in 1681, 24 volumes had appeared and more were in preparation. By this time a community of scholars were involved in the work and it would continue even through its own suppression, the suppression of the Jesuits, and a refoundation in the 19th century using the developing tools of philology and historical criticism. As the Roman Church periodically reformed its calendars, they relied heavily upon the Bollandists’ Acta Sanctorum–as they continue to do. New volumes and supplements continue to be issued.

It’s this group, their efforts and labors, that was hanging in the minds of Massey Shepherd, Jr., Morton Stone, and Bayard Jones as they worked on their own calendar revision (two volumes by Hippolyte Delehaye published by the Société des Bollandistes appear in the General Bibliography of PBS IX).

Why does this matter? In a word–Incarnation. A mature sanctoral theology is grounded by a great many things but at the core is the doctrine and concept of Incarnation. Saints are humans. Regular, fallible, sinful people–just like you and me. Yet, they serve as examples of how our weak flesh maybe suffused by the light of Christ that the people they encounter might see their good works and glorify their Father who is in heaven. And Incarnation demands historicity because without it, all we are left with is a pleasant, pious story.

Complications

But–it’s also more complicated than that.

The way I see it, the story of the saints is not simply an exercise in history. No more than the story of a nation is an exercise in history. And that’s because history is a very slippery animal. The way I can explain it best is like this…

The discipline of history is the science of discovering facts–truths–about reality in the past that can be quantified. A certain man died here on a certain day. A battle was fought at this site in a certain year. A pot, of a particular type, made at a particular time, by particular people, was broken here because we have gathered its fragments. These momentary points of truth are then gathered and weighted–some receive more weight, some less–but taken together these weighted facts become steps and signposts in the creation of a subjective narrative (or set of narratives) that rely on these data points to pull together something coherent, that can account for the greatest number of the most compelling points in the best way.

This is why history changes; why the past is not fixed. Not only can the data points themselves be reinvestigated as new techniques give us new information with which to study them, but the stories in which we embed them are subject to revision as we learn more and as we examine the constellations of data points from new and changing angles. And that’s the point of so-called “revisionist” history: the subjective narratives that former historians have built around the data points they had access to are what is being revised in the light of new facts and new narrative options. (Indeed, one of the best examples of revisionist history in the fields I know best is Eamon Duffy’s Stripping of the Altars which led to a complete reassessment of late medieval piety and spirituality.)

I’d suggest that both stories of nations and stories of the saints are far better conceived of not as objective history, but as an exercise in social memory.

Social memory rests on history, even on a framework of historical facts, but is an origin myth where the facts themselves matter less than their role in a foreshortened, condensed, and broad-stroked story that we tell ourselves to establish our cohesive group identity today. Social memory is a corporate and collective exercise in describing who we are now, by telling a story about who we were and how we got here.

So many of the modern political fights that we assume are about history are actually about who controls and narrates the social memory. Does our Story Of America! start with the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock in 1620 or in Jamestown in 1607? Is the start of the story about the establishment of a corporate town to funnel money and profits back to England or is it…a story about the establishment of a corporate town to funnel money and profits back to England from the Virginia area? (Less than half of the people on the Mayflower were radical Puritans; the majority were adventurers and tradesmen–and that’s a historical fact.)

So what does this mean and how should it influence our stories about the saints and the commemorations we put on our calendars?

To my mind, it means that who we choose matters because when we choose them we are saying something about us as much are we are saying something about them. And looking at how people are chosen, which people are chosen, can tell interesting and sometimes uncomfortable truths about us. Like how the Roman Calendar in the 19th century was greatly weighted towards French, Spanish, and Italian bishops… What does that say about who is important in the church?

In the same way, we should asks questions like–why George? Is it because of his connection to “Englishness”? Is he a symbol of national or ethnic origins? Or because he is a tie to our deep history: a saint called upon by our spiritual ancestors since the eighth century and possibly before? A human echo of the angelic St. Michael, slaying with his lance a dragon, symbol of Satan, just as his angelic mentor rides down Satan himself?

I don’t have answer–but I think it’s essential that we ask the question…

Ending, for now

I’ve been thinking a lot about saints recently.

I’ll likely have more to say as I think through it all. Reflecting on some of the stuff mentioned above, and quite a number of things not included up there as well. But I thought I’d just go ahead and share this with you now as I get the writing juices flowing again.